This article was adapted from “Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon,” by Gretchen Morgenson, a business reporter and columnist for The New York Times, and Joshua Rosner, a managing director at the independent research consultant Graham Fisher. The book is to be published on Tuesday by Times Books.

MARC COHODES had heard the stories.

Heard how these guys would give a mortgage to anyone — even to a corpse, the joke went. How the place was run like a frat house.

You wouldn’t believe the things that go on there, his brother-in-law had told him.